In known tire manufacturing plants, reinforced components, such as a body ply or tread ply, are usually formed from textile cords which, after undergoing a series of processing operations, are arranged in parallel to form the axial warp of a textile strip or fabric. Such processing usually consists of a calendaring operation, whereby both sides of the textile strip are coated with rubber to produce a rubber-coated strip in which the cords are arranged axially. The rubber-coated strip is then subjected to a cutting and splicing operation, whereby it is cut into portions, the cutting direction being substantially perpendicular to the axial warp for body plies, and at an angle of other than 90.degree. to the axial warp for the tread plies. Said portions are then turned through 90.degree. and the original lateral ends spliced to form a composite strip constituting the required reinforced component, in which the cords are arranged transversely or at a given angle in relation to the longitudinal axis of the composite strip.
By virtue of the number of operations required for producing said composite strip, the noted method of manufacturing said reinforced component clearly involves considerable cost. Moreover, said composite strip presents a number of transverse splices which may result in unacceptable vibration of the finished tire.
A further possible drawback of known reinforced components of the aforementioned type is that each cord portion inside the component originates from a respective cord of ideally infinite length fed onto the press and having its own "history" independent of that of the adjacent cords. In other words, by virtue of containing a large number of independent cord portions in terms of age, composition (which cannot be absolutely identical for all the cords), humidity, elasticity, size, etc., known reinforced components of the aforementioned type contain numerous independent, at times uncontrollable, variables making consistent results extremely difficult to achieve.